Tag Archives: greg gibson

Writing anything about bookdealers is very similar to that “Acknowledgements” bit in the front of your first novel. I say your first novel because mine exists only in my crowded little head, but it’s good, oh hell yes! Watch out Neil Gaiman! Beware Dostoevsky (that’s actually good advice)! Look to your laurels Jilly Cooper!

From this you will have gathered that the plot of my first novel involves impoverished, self involved, modern day myth archetypes who also shop and play polo. Tiger blood, that’s what I’ve got!

It’s akin to the acknowledgements page because; there are thousands of bookdealers (good, bad and print on demand), they all know each other (What? Fetish clubs are very convenient places to do business and often have very competitively priced cocktails), you’re never going to fit them all in and you’re destined to end up with a lame “You know who you are…” type of thing at the end. Believe me, I need all the friends I can get (everyone here, including my cat, is nodding at this), so this shall not happen to me! I shall bring everybody to your sage attention, everybody…

Not content to leave it there I present his manly yet understated blog which I think you will find has citrussy tones over a solid bed of sandalwood: Bookman’s Log

All joking aside, it’s worth it just for this observation about the last California book fair:

“That said (Ever notice how the phrase “that said” has caught on? It’s made great progress in the language, despite the fact that it’s nowhere near as interestingly malign as the equally popular “with all due respect” which, of course means, “with no respect at all.”), much of the Saturday crowd were what I call “molecules.” Molecules are attendees who bump around the floor in a sort of random Brownian motion, occasionally bonding to a low valence book. Some molecules also form new compounds by bonding with free catalogs or other molecules.”